Michael Bloomberg Considering Running for Mayor of London

Friends of Bloomberg and Conservatives across the pond are seeking to draft the billionaire anglophile to run next year in the London mayoral election as the Tory candidate.

The current mayor, Boris Johnson, of a city of 8.5 million, is term limited and is thinking of running for Prime Minister in May 2016.

Steve Hilton, a trusted adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron, is urging Bloomberg to run.  “It would be an incredible coup for London if Mike Bloomberg could be persuaded to run for mayor here,” Hilton said.  “His kind of pragmatic, problem-solving leadership is exactly what London needs.”

Hilton said he previously discussed the possibility of a Bloomberg run with Conservative Cameron and Finance Minister George Osborne back in 2008, before Johnson was nominated as the Tory pick for mayor, but abandoned the plan when Bloomberg announced he would run for a third term in New York.  Johnson also discussed the idea with Bloomberg.  “Mike is an enormous friend of London. He’s a great contributor to the city. He’s got many supporters and admirers, of which Boris is definitely one,” a source said.

After his mayoralty ended in 2013, Bloomberg began spending a lot of time and money in London, building “Bloomberg Palace,” a two-tower skyscraper, on the site of Roman temple ruins.

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He owns a $20 million town house in the city by the Thames and sits on the board of the Serpentine Galleries.

Queen Elizabeth II bestowed him with an honorary knighthood in 2014 for his entrepreneurial and philanthropic work in the UK.  “I am deeply honored to receive this recognition, which is especially meaningful to me because of my close . . . ties to London and Britain,” he said at the time.  Bloomberg added Britain is “a place I have long considered my second home.”

However, he is not a citizen of the UK or the European Union, a prerequisite for running for mayor.  But his investment in the country would allow him to become a citizen just by asking.

Rich foreigners can fast-track their applications for British residency by investing $15 million in the UK, but that still takes two years.  Tory politicians could speed up the process because Bloomberg has invested at least $745 million in the UK, sources told the Sunday Times.  “We don’t think it would be a problem,” insisted a source familiar with the discussions.

Both Bloomberg’s daughters, Emma, 36, and Georgina, 32, are British citizens, as is his ex-wife, Susan Brown, born in the UK.











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Bloomberg's Next Empire

It is the biggest development in London's buzzing financial district, two bronze-and-stone towers, connected by sky-bridges atop the ruins of a 2,000-year-old Roman temple. The three-acre site is just yards from the River Thames and alongside a huge building project for new offices on Queen Victoria Street in the heart of London's financial district and is also home to the Temple of Mithras.

Bloomberg Place, roughly the size of a Manhattan city block, is the future European home of Michael R. Bloomberg’s company and charity. But it is only one piece of the New York City mayor’s growing British empire. He is underwriting a major expansion of one of England’s most prestigious galleries, Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, designed by the noted architect Zaha Hadid.

Mr. Bloomberg, an Anglophile with a taste for English Regency style, is exporting his vast quantities of financial, social and political capital to this ancient city, where he has long yearned for influence. He threw himself into the city’s cultural scene, joining the boards of the Serpentine and the Old Vic theater. In a country where the government often financed the arts, Mr. Bloomberg adopted a more American style of corporate giving, stamping his name in museums where he paid for audio guides and sponsoring the Royal Court theater’s “Bloomberg Mondays,” when tickets are sold at a discount. He bought a box at Ascot, the high-society horse racing grounds.

Bloomberg Place, soon to be enshrined on the London map, is currently a mud pit crawling with cranes and bulldozers. By 2016, it will be home to a futuristic campus designed by the architect Norman Foster: it is to include a pair of undulating office buildings, pedestrian plazas, spaces for 390 bicycles and, if the mayor gets his way, branches of New York restaurants.

In one corner of the development sits the Temple of Mithras, Walbrook, a relic from London’s days under Roman rule. First uncovered in 1954, the temple, a sacrificial altar for an ancient religion, is being restored at Mr. Bloomberg’s expense.

Thousands of Roman artefacts have been unearthed in an archaeological dig hailed as 'the most important excavation ever held in London'. Archaeologists have found coins, pottery, shoes, lucky charms and an amber Gladiator amulet which date back almost 2,000 years. Experts leading the excavation have also uncovered wooden structures from the 40s AD around 40ft beneath the ground.

The discoveries have been so well preserved in the muddy waters of the lost Walbrook River that archaeologists have nicknamed the site 'the Pompeii of the North'. Sadie Watson, the site director from the Museum of London Archaeology, said: 'Certainly the archaeology on this project so far is probably the most important excavation ever held within London, certainly within Roman London.

It has offered experts an unprecedented glimpse into life in the bustling centre of Roman Londinium. Archaeologists from the museum were able to excavate the area when work to build the vast Bloomberg Place development began. Since then around 10,000 accessioned finds have been discovered by 60 archaeologists, the largest haul of small finds to have ever been recovered on a single excavation in the capital.

More than 100 fragments of Roman writing tablets have been unearthed, while 700 boxes of pottery fragments will be analysed by specialists. This site has provided the largest quantity of Roman leather to have ever been unearthed in the capital, including hundreds of shoes.

Sophie Jackson, from the museum, said: 'The site is a wonderful slice through the first four centuries of London's existence. The waterlogged conditions left by the Walbrook stream have given us layer upon layer of Roman timber buildings, fences and yards, all beautifully preserved and containing amazing personal items, clothes and even documents - all of which will transform our understanding of the people of Roman London.'










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